Donal McLaughlin, Designer of United Nations Emblem, Dies at 102

Donal McLaughlin, an architect and graphic designer whose hastily concocted design for a lapel pin became one of the world’s most recognizable symbols — the official United Nations emblem, showing the continents embraced by olive branches — died Sept. 27 at his home in Garrett Park, Md. He was 102.

The cause was esophageal cancer, said his son, Brian.

In spring 1945, delegates from 50 Allied nations converged on San Francisco to attend the United Nations Conference on International Organization, convened to put the finishing touches on a charter for the United Nations.

Conferences require brochures, placards and, of course, badges.

“It was my good fortune to be assigned the problem of designing a lapel pin for conference identification,” Mr. McLaughlin wrote in “Origin of the Emblem and Other Recollections of the 1945 U.N. Conference,” which he published in 1995.

Mr. McLaughlin, who was the chief of the graphics presentation branch of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the C.I.A., led a design team under the supervision of Oliver Lincoln Lundquist, who died in 2008. After considering and rejecting several prototypes, Mr. McLaughlin came up with a round emblem showing the continents against circular lines of latitude and vertical lines of longitude, framed by two overlapping olive branches.

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Donal McLaughlin helped design the United Nations Conference pin below. Its look was later modified for the emblem.Credit
Robert Lautman

The emblem was also stamped in gold on the United Nations Charter, signed that June, and a year and a half later it was adopted, with modifications, as the official seal and emblem of the United Nations.

Mr. McLaughlin was born in Manhattan on July 26, 1907, and grew up in the Bronx. In pursuing an architectural career, he followed in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, James McLaughlin, who designed many of Cincinnati’s public buildings.

His timing was poor. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale in 1933 and an architecture diploma from the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in 1937, impeccable credentials that meant little or nothing in the depths of the Depression.

Initially, he worked for the government on housing for planned greenbelt towns. He later designed structures for the National Park Service. In 1937 he married Laura Nevius, who died in 1998. In addition to his son, Brian, of Takoma Park, Md., he is survived by his daughters, Coille Hooven and Karen McLaughlin Gallant, both of Berkeley, Calif.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

After returning to New York, he collaborated with the industrial designers Walter Dorwin Teague and Raymond Loewy on exhibits for the 1939 World’s Fair and, in association with the architect James Gordon Carr, designed a new Pepsi-Cola bottle and the interiors of Tiffany & Company’s new flagship store on Fifth Avenue. After taking part with Loewy and Teague in planning sessions for a proposed war room under the White House, Mr. McLaughlin went to Washington to help the O.S.S. develop visual material for the military. As head of the graphics branch, he produced insignia and informational films with animated special effects and diagrams, like instructions for derailing German trains that were printed on cigarette packs. Mr. McLaughlin later applied these presentation techniques to the displays used by war crimes prosecutors at the Nuremburg trials, which took place in a courtroom he designed.

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Credit
Robert Lautman

The United Nations emblem had a difficult birth. Mr. McLaughlin, in his pamphlet, recalled that the initial task was to fit a pictorial image, along with the words “The United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, 1945,” on a round button measuring just 1 1/16 inches across.

Rejected prototypes included a globe surrounded by chains intended to represent nations linked in peace. “Linked in peace, but also a world in chains,” Mr. McLaughlin noted. Another image showed a chimneylike brick structure, bound by the “mortar of cooperation,” with an olive branch poking out. “Could be a trademark for the Structural Clay Products Institute,” Mr. McLaughlin wrote.

Eventually Mr. McLaughlin’s idea for a map projection of the continents, with the United States front and center on the vertical axis, won out. Ivan Spear, a team member, softened the image by adding laurel branches, an idea he borrowed from the Philco logo. Mr. McLaughlin, recalling that the laurel symbolized victory, substituted olive branches, a symbol of peace.